A family is baffled by the jigsaw of an inexplicable death, Julie-Anne Davies and Steve Waldon report.

They found the car in a gully early on Tuesday morning. Still on the family's Western District property, but hidden, because even in his unyielding despair, the driver had not entirely discarded his dignity.

Nearby was the body of the driver, Simon Gubbins, and the gun he had used to end his life some time the previous night.

Mr Gubbins's suicide in March was a little earthquake; the tremors rolled through Hamilton and Mortlake and all the way to Geelong. In fact, the aftershocks were felt across Australia. The family had determined from the outset that there would be no pretence about the manner of Mr Gubbins's death. His father John sent an email to friends and colleagues the next day stating that Simon had simply shot himself.

"That's what happened so there was no point saying otherwise," the father says.

Simon Gubbins was 43, too young to die. Not just too young, say his grieving family and friends, but far too good. The unmistakeable impression of him is of an achiever, admired as much as loved, blessed with good genes and, at the end, a father trying to ensure his three sons grew up with solid values and the sure knowledge that they were loved.

At his funeral he was described as one of Australia's best and most innovative sheep and beef producers. Busloads of farmers, students, academics, and overseas visitors made the long trip to his Western District property Murroa to see how Mr Gubbins had doubled his property's stocking rates in a decade through new pastoral technology.

He had been a district councillor for the Victorian Farmers Federation, was president of the Grassland Society of Victoria, a director of the Australian Beef Association, chairman of Rural Industries Skill Training, an adviser to Melbourne University's agriculture faculty, and - naturally - captain of the local Buckley Swamp fire brigade.

In the obituary that appeared in newspapers around Australia, former Geelong Grammar head of history Michael Collins Persse told the story of the Simon Gubbins he knew as a student, and whose subsequent career he followed.

"Handsome, hard-working, intelligent, an athlete, a natural leader; he was also to an extraordinary degree kind, generous and sensitive to the needs of others," Mr Collins Persse wrote.

The photograph that ran alongside showed a broad-smiling, impossibly good-looking bloke - the archetypal Australian man of the land writ large - which made the next line seem unfathomable. "More than 1000 people attended a memorial service at his property... where, tragically, he had ended his own life six days earlier."

To a casual newspaper reader the obituary raised the question: "Why?"

The man Mr Collins Persse described was all those things and more, his family says. But he was also a man who took his own life. They don't shy away from that brutal fact: but how can they begin to understand it?

"We're not ashamed of him, but we wish he hadn't done it," his mother Jenny Gubbins says.

While every death by suicide conjures a victim's own demons, there are often broader messages that warrant a community's closer examination if people are to understand why so many Australian men are choosing death as the solution to their troubles.

Simon Gubbins was a man who was struggling to strike the right balance in his relationship with his much-loved three sons after a marriage break-up some years earlier. In this he was certainly not alone and, as his mother points out, recent moves by the Howard Government to open up a debate on fathers' roles in their children's lives following divorce might have made all the difference - if only they had come a little earlier.

One of the more common triggers for male suicide is marriage breakdown and its subsequent strains, especially when children are involved. Mr Gubbins and his former wife shared custody of the children. But increasingly he began to believe he was failing his boys, according to those who observed him closely. He saw himself as inadequate, even an obstacle to their development and happiness.

"I think he felt very alone with this problem," his mother says. "If he had seen all the publicity that's been around recently about men and the Family Court, he wouldn't have felt so alone."

A wry, stoic woman whose family has farmed in the Western District for more than a century, Jenny Gubbins rejects any suggestion that her eldest son's death was triggered by depression. "It shouldn't have happened, simple as that," she says bluntly.

Paradoxically, everyone who knew Simon Gubbins commented that they had never seen him so happy in the last few years of his life - in large part because of his new relationship with an old friend, Fiona Mercer.

Family friend and former long-standing Liberal Party MP Ian Smith, who spoke at the memorial service for Gubbins, says the farmer had confided in him about his sense of failure.

"To Simon, just doing your best in the circumstances you faced was not good enough - he had to make things right and in his mind, he couldn't," Mr Smith says.

"To Simon, the honorable solution was not to fail, but to remove himself as the obstacle..."

Those bereaved by suicide are almost always tortured by the thought that they may have missed vital clues, pointers to the impending fate of their loved ones. Like so many victims, Simon Gubbins's actions in the days leading to his death do not appear to be those of a man about to end his life.

It was the Labor Day weekend, and Mr Gubbins's two younger sons were staying at Murroa, with him and Fiona. On the Friday night the couple had dinner in town with friends and, as close mate Graham Lean would recall later, "Gub" was in fine form.

Driving home, Mr Gubbins agreed to demonstrate some of the snappier features of Fiona's new Saab to his friends. But rain had set in so he had turned the car around, driven back to the club where they had been dining, and fetched umbrellas.

"So, umbrellas up, car roof down, they set off back along the main street of Hamilton, passing people gaping on the footpath," Lean said.

A keen cyclist, Mr Gubbins had taken part in a 90-kilometre ride from Hamilton to Port Fairy on the Sunday morning, and that night he took the boys spotlighting.

"I had driven him back from Port Fairy to Murroa," Jenny Gubbins recalls. She and her son did talk about his anxieties concerning the children - but this was not unusual. "We were close. He spoke to me about these things but he certainly wasn't any more or less upset than usual."

Jenny and John Gubbins have walked each step of their son's last day over and over in their minds since his body was found in that gully.

It was a family day - gardening, playing with the kids, making plans for the coming week. There was a radio interview on Tuesday with the local station, 3HA, to talk about his forthcoming bull sale, and people coming to view Mr Gubbins's pastoral trials later that morning.

But early in the evening, he drove the boys back to their mother's home in Hamilton and something apparently snapped in Simon Gubbins's mind in the course of that 25-kilometre journey.

"Fiona told us that when he walked in the door he was ashen-faced," Jenny Gubbins explains quietly. "He had a shower, sat down to eat then suddenly pushed back his chair and said 'I'm going to get rid of the problem'. He then grabbed a gun and left."

When people like Simon Gubbins die this way, it is profoundly difficult for those left behind to reconcile the final tragic act with the personality they knew. He was, after all, an accomplished man who, though struggling to keep his boys close to his love, had everything to live for.

Graham Lean misses his best mate terribly. He is still trying to fathom what went so wrong in such an apparently short space of time but one thing of which he is certain: Mr Gubbins was not suffering depression nor, he believes, was his death premeditated.

"I believe that Simon's last actions were not conscious actions. He had snapped and was 'running' - unfortunately he had relatively easy access to a firearm. Some of the issues that led to his accident, as I prefer to think of it, are a warning to individuals and society as a whole, that, first, divorce must be more equitable - it is a total financial and emotional mess; second, we all need to have better support structures surrounding us.

"The irony is that Simon did so much of this stuff, and despite his best efforts, somehow it wasn't quite enough."

One sister, Georgina, believes her brother had a thorn in his heart that he couldn't remove. But she also believes there is much to be learnt from his death. "Things happen for a reason, and are sent to teach us a lesson. (But) what that lesson is at the moment, I am not sure," she says.